


There Will Be Time

by pocketmouse



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Episode: s05e07 Amy's Choice, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-19
Updated: 2011-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-23 20:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/254851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocketmouse/pseuds/pocketmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Amy's Choice, Amy and Rory talk about their dreams for their future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Will Be Time

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to such_heights for betaing this for me.  
> Title comes from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  
> Written for the domestic/tradesman kink for kink_bingo, taking the 'domestic' part pretty literally.

“Was that really your dream?” Amy asked. She poked the bunkbed desultorily, wondering again if the TARDIS was trying to tell her something. “Was that really what you want?”

Rory looked up from the book he’d been trying to make his way through for the better part of a week. “Which part, the part where we still lived in Leadworth or the part where at least we knew trouble was coming because there was a big blue box on our doorstep?” He shifted in the overstuffed chair.

“Flowerbed,” she corrected mildly, still able to remember the mix of fond resignation and ire. The details of the dream had faded a little, with time, but neither of them had been quite willing to sleep yet, stumbling around the TARDIS until the Doctor had all but locked them in their rooms, saying the TARDIS wasn’t going anywhere until he was sure they weren’t going to pass out at the first sign of a flat surface. “Both parts,” she said, but then clarified with “little house, kid on the way, we didn’t own a car, why didn’t we even own a _car_ —”

“I don’t think it was my dream.” Rory had set the book down, and appeared to be thinking. “If you want the stupid reason, I’d say it’s usually because my dreams aren’t in color. Or I get one color at a time, like old magazines. And it felt real while we were in it — I wanted those things. But do I really?” Amy held her breath. Rory always cut right to the heart of the matter. “No. I mean, I like Leadworth, but I doubt I’d be able to dream up an even more boring version of it. I’m pretty sure there is no real Upper Leadworth, anyway. And I don’t want to be a doctor. I like being a nurse. And no, the ponytail wasn’t my idea either.”

“What about the rest of it?” she asked. “I’m willing to blame the town full of OAPs on the Doctor, but the kid, the house, all that —” she stopped, before she mentioned being pregnant again.

But Rory could see right through her. “Do you want kids?”

“I don’t know. Maybe — eventually?” She shook her head. “I haven’t really thought about it. Not _soon_ , though. I’m still freaked out by the idea that we’re getting _married_ , there’s no way I want kids just yet.” She twisted the ring on her finger.

Rory let out a breath. “Oh, good. Me too. I mean, I make enough money for both of us at the hospital, but a kid? That scares the crap out of me. No, I blame that bit on the Doctor, too.”

“He didn’t even notice at first!” she pointed out, hands coming up to shape a (thankfully imaginary) huuuuuuuuuge stomach.

“He said the dream was his. And the point was that we’d moved on, were doing stuff that meant we couldn’t come back on the TARDIS,” Rory said. He stood up and moved over to sit next to Amy on the bottom bunk, breaking the circle of her hands, holding one of them in his. “And when the village is too boring even for me, there’s no way I dreamed that up. But the idea of us, together years in the future? Yeah, that’s definitely a dream I have.” His thumb twisted over the ring on her finger.

Rory was beautiful, and amazing, and had the kind of patience and brilliance Aunt Sharon always wished Amy had, and she loved him so much, but she almost never understood him. “I still don’t get why you want to marry me.” She very carefully didn’t look at Rory’s face.

“Because I love you. And I want to be with you for the rest of my life.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have to get married to do that.” And okay, yeah, maybe the word ‘love’ scared the crap out of her. Even more than the idea of marriage.

“Then we don’t have to.” Rory shifted to hold her other hand as well. “I meant what I said in Venice — I’ll go back to Leadworth and make something up. Or we don’t have to go back at all. We could live on a space station, or Mars, or something —” his voice was smooth, confident, the exact opposite of the endearing tremble he’d had when he’d gone down on one knee the first time, almost tripping on the uneven ground. She kissed him just to shut him up.

And, okay, because Rory wasn’t a bad kisser. It always took him a moment to recover from that surprise, like he still didn’t know what to do with the fact that Amy was kissing him. But once it clicked, it was like his whole body just turned _on_ , hands moving towards her waist, his whole upper body leaning in, his mouth opening so her tongue could slip inside, steal his breath before his words could take hers away again.

Another minute and she pulled away, Rory following after her automatically, but she was already leaning back in, resting her forehead against his. “I love you,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “And I’m crap at saying it, I know. But I can do things, yeah, and marrying you — that’s like a lot of ‘I love you’s, right?”

Rory squeezed her tightly, then pulled back to look at her. There was a flush to his cheeks. “It’s like a thousand ‘I love you’s.” He was looking at her with the kind of love that scared her. She didn’t know what she was supposed to _do_ with it. But she knew Rory worried, sometimes, that because she didn’t say it, she didn’t love him. Or love him enough. She wasn’t sure, the whole topic made her twitch.

“Sorry I freaked out and ran off,” she said.

“Well, you freaked out and ran off with someone who had the levelheadedness to let me know what was up once they found out themselves,” he said, graciously granting the Doctor a point. “I don’t think most of your other friends would have done that that.” Or have a time machine so that Amy could have all the time she wanted to be really properly ready. But she didn’t say that out loud. “At least I didn’t have to put the wedding on hold and buy a plane ticket to Taiwan.”

She gave him a look. “Taiwan?”

“It’s really really far away?”

“And I don’t speak Taiwanese. No, knowing us, I’d run off to America, since I _speak English_ , become a showgirl in Vegas, and you’d follow me there and we’d get married by an Elvis impersonator.”

Rory appeared to be actually giving it some thought. “I’ve seen CSI, Las Vegas has hospitals. Would you get one of those giant feathered headdresses?”

“Yeah, I’d have some ridiculous thing with ostrich feathers and a collar that covers my shoulders and rolls up over my head, a g-string, and a bunch of sequins all over the whole thing.”

“We’d both work nights, so you’d finally let us get blackout curtains.”

“With our accents, we could convince people we’re spies —”

“British spies? In America? In 2011?” Rory looked doubtful.

“All right, maybe not. I’d probably hate living in America, actually,” she said, feeling a little regretful. Which was stupid. She was in the _TARDIS_ , she could go to America if she wanted.

“You’d have to actually learn how to drive this time,” Rory agreed.

“Hey.” She punched him in the shoulder, hard. “I can drive. I just don’t have a car.” Rory didn’t argue. He never did. “I just —” she stopped, suddenly serious again. “What if it doesn’t work? I don’t know how this stuff works, not _really_ — I mean, my parents are gone, Aunt Sharon’s never settled down with someone for more than a week, your parents are split up; I can’t — I don’t want that to happen to us.”

“It won’t. Plenty of people manage it every year. I plan to be one of those old people the Doctor was so freaked out by. Ninety years old if I’m a day, on my third hip replacement, and complaining that my grandkids don’t visit enough.”

“Oh, now you want grandkids?”

“Yeah. And we’ll tell them about when we used to travel through time and space, and they won’t believe a word of it.” Rory grinned at her. “I’ve been in love with you almost since I met you, Amy. Getting married doesn’t change that, or put conditions on it. It doesn’t change you.”

“Getting married is something grownups do,” she said, repeating her argument from the dream.

“Yeah, it’s also something rock stars do for a month. I’d be waiting for a thousand years if I thought you had to grow up first. You’re plenty grown up, you just don’t like admitting it.”

Amy made a disapproving noise. “Rory, you’re not allowed to burn through all my excuses.”

He grinned again, and kissed her on the cheek. “Sure I can.” Rory didn’t use to be this confident. She wondered how much he’d been scared too, afraid because of what she couldn’t say.

“It still feels weird, though, the idea that we’ll be together for the rest of our lives.”

“We’ve already known each other for most of our lives, is it really that different?”

Yes? “Would you really? Would you really be okay with it if I said no?”

Rory went white a little, though he kept looking straight at her. “Yes. Well — no, but if it made you happy, I’d do it.”

Something trembled in her chest, and she shook her head. “There you go, saying such _stupid_ things. You’ve got all the self-preservation of a lemming.” She drew in a shaky breath. “If you want to marry me, Rory Williams, you have to stick around. No looking out the window and getting gassed by an alien neighbor. No forgetting to look both ways and getting decked by a bus. You want to be old and ninety, and I do too. I won’t —” she stopped, this time Rory cutting her off with a soft kiss.

“We’ll both be old and grey and a hundred years old,” he said softly. “I’ll have arthritis but I’ll be knitting the Doctor a sweater, because he drops by every ten years or so and is still as young as ever. You’ll be on your second hip, but it’s because you busted your original hip going snowboarding in Switzerland when you were forty-two. You’ll still have all your own teeth and there’s always a bowl of apples on the table.”

“And do our kids live down the street and make the grandkids come over on weekends and mow the lawn?”

Rory shook his head. “No, they all moved to the Moon because our kid works at the university. History, probably. Or maybe an engineer.”

“So that’s why you complain they never visit.”

“Thank god for holographic vids or we’d never see what they looked like properly.”

Amy had to laugh at that. “We’ll be a hundred, not twelve hundred.”

“Yeah, well, fifty years ago we barely had television, let alone the internet. Who knows where we’ll be in forty, seventy years?”

Right here with you, she thought, and for the first time, it felt like something to aim for.


End file.
